Netball with Pumpkins!

Under 12 State Netball Competition!

Congratualations to the Sunshine Coast under 12 netball girls, who played some really good games this year!  While unable to back last years win up, they came fourth, with one of their players selected for the Queensland team, and another player picked as a shadow for the Queensland team!  Overall, the Sunshine Coast girls had a great time in Barcaldine.  Thanks a lot girls for coming out and playing some great netball games!

Pumpkin Sourdough Bread

Over the last few weeks, the tourist season has really hit us.  The shop is regularly packed out to the door with tourists trying to get some coffee and cake.  As you can imagine, trying to keep product up during this demanding time is extremely hard, let alone time to sit down and write a blog entry!

However, when I recently went to Brisbane and visited a few well known bakeries, I found some inspiration for a new product! Pumpkin Sourdough!

In my spare time (like there is lots!) I came up with a great sourdough recipe.  While I will share the recipe, I would like to explain the reasons behind the ingredients and methods I used.

Recipe

Starter:

Flour 50%

Wholemeal Flour 50%

Sour starter 50%

Water 60%

Final Dough

Flour 80%

Wholemeal Flour 20%

Pumpkin 35%

Salt 2.4%

Yeast 0.4%

Water 45%

Starter 30%

Pepper to taste

Nutmeg to taste

For an explaination of the bakers percentages, check out wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker_percentage  Although, this is probably over complicated, I will endeavour to explain it in a simpler fashion in a future blog post.

The day before you want to make the sour dough, it is important to make the sour dough starter.  This starter gives flavor and body to the bread as well as being a replacement for commercial yeast.  I decided to use wholemeal flour in this starter to give an almost sweet nutty flavor to the final bread. 

The pumpkin also needs to be roasted the day before to allow it time to cool.  You only need to roast it until it is soft to stick a knife through.  My pumpkin took 1 hour at 180 degrees.

The next day, it is time to mix the final dough.  Put all the ingredients in the mixing bowl at the start of the mixing process.  You can use all the pumpkin skin and all.  The amount of water in the final dough will depend on the amount of water in the pumpkin.  You may need to add more flour or water as the dough mixes. 

After this, a normal sourdough bread production method is used, where the dough rises in bulk for 2 hours.  We cut the final loaves at 700g, rested them, then did a final mold in to cobbs (or boules in French!)

Once it is shaped into a boule, we cut the into the middle top with a cookie cutter, and 5 cuts around the sides of the loaf, so when it baked it would look (slightly) like a pumpkin.  Sticking to the pumpkin theme, we added pumpkin seeds to the top for a stunning effect (and tasty addition!)

But why?

I decided to make the final dough with a small amount of wholemeal flour, so that the nutty bran flavor would carry through the bread.  Using 35% pumpkin in this dough is similar to a standard(ish) industry fruit dough, where there is about 30 - 35% fruit through the dough.  I decided I didnt want the sour dough to overpower the pumpkin flavor, so I used a smaller amount of 30% (some recipes can use 50 - 60% starter or more). 

However, taking into consideration the small amount of sour dough culture and the added pumpkin to the dough, I decided the dough would probably be a bit slow to rise.  In France, sourdoughs are legally alowed to have up to 0.4% yeast in the bread before it is not considered a sourdough anymore.  So using this figure as a guideline, I used the 0.4% yeast in this dough to help it rise. 

When thinking about pumpkin, warm thick pumpkin soup comes to mind, and with that thoughts of pepper and nutmeg (well in my mind anyway!) These are traditional spices to add to pumpkin, so I decided to add them to the Pumpkin Sourdough to give a background flavor for the pumpkin to sit against.  Without actually measuring the amount I used, it would be less than 0.5% of the flour weight in the final dough.

So. There are my reasons for using this particular recipe and ingredients.  AND it turned out so well, it might just make it through to being a permanent item in my recipe book.